Parasite Eve (18 page)

    Two weeks after the
operation, Mariko’s dialysis began. Three times a week, directly after school,
she spent four to five hours in a hospital bed for the procedure, after which
she took the last bus to return home by ten. This continued for six months. In
that whole time, Anzai visited the hospital only a few times. Mariko spent more
than enough time in bed alone, gazing absent-mindedly out the window. She
sometimes had bad reactions to the treatment, which usually resulted in
seizures.
It couldn’t have been easy on her
, thought Anzai. When he
recalled the figure of his sleeping daughter, he felt a twinge of pity. What
crossed her mind as she watched her blood flow into the bedside monitor, the
slowly turning blood pump and the long, thin dialyzer leading back to her arm?
Only now did he wonder what she had gone through. At the time of the actual
treatment, such things had hardly even crossed his mind.

    “Please think of this as a
temporary measure,” the doctor had said. “In the case of young children with
kidney failure who have to go through long periods of dialysis, side effects
are not uncommon. The biggest concern is a stunting of body growth. Kidneys do
have a role in physical development, and a failed kidney will hinder it.
Growing taller means a lot to children. Were Mariko to continue dialysis like
this, she might become deeply concerned about her height. Prolonged treatment
would inhibit bone growth and have possibly adverse effects on her reproductive
system as well.”

    “But what other options do we
have...?”

    “Transplantation is of course
the best way to go. Would you like us to look into it for you?”

    Despite the doctor’s earnest
offer, Anzai had been unable to get a handle on his emotions at that moment.

    The most logical thing to do
was to submit to the knife and offer one of his own kidneys. And yet, the idea
frightened him. He was concerned for his own well-being and conferred with the
doctor at great length about his hesitations.

    Whenever Anzai went out
drinking with his colleagues, their conversations always seemed to return to
the topic of his daughter’s condition. Anzai would answer only vaguely and try
to change the subject, but since everyone was usually drunk, they were
persistent. Organ transplantation was a hot topic in the news at that time.

    “Must be a beautiful thing
they share, those parents who give organs to their own kids, wouldn’t you say?”
his superior slurred one time. “In other countries, they take organs from dead
bodies and transplant them into the living. That’s just barbaric if you ask me.
Then again, we handle everything much more delicately here in Japan anyway. Hey
Anzai, what if you gave one of your kidneys to your daughter? You’ve got two of
‘em, you know. You’d get along fine with one. How can you just stand by when
she’s in so much pain? Your wife is dead, so you’re all she can depend on. That’s
what I’d call real love.”

    Though an affable smile came
to Anzai’s face, he was trying with all his might to quell the anger boiling up
inside of him.

    In reality, these were just
the ramblings of someone who didn’t have a child with kidney problems. Was he
saying that Anzai was inhumane for not wanting to give up an organ? Did parents
have an obligation, even in body, to their children? Was it his duty as a parent
to make an unconditional sacrifice? Surgery was a horrible thought for anyone,
and if he could find a path to avoid it, he would take it. Did that go against
the love between parent and child? He almost voiced his opposition aloud, but
instead tightened the grip around his glass and listened to what his colleagues
had to say.

    When he came to his senses,
Anzai found himself at Yoshizumi’s office. He shook his head once and cooled
his heated thoughts before knocking on the door.

10

    The sound of boiling water
filled the air. Asakura placed a sample tube into it, then set the timer. At
last, she was close to finishing a day-long experiment. She sighed and looked
around the room.

    She was on the second floor
of the Radioisotope Research Building. The room was used exclusively for the
treatment of low- level radioactive matter. She was the only one there, her
surroundings having fallen into quietude hours before. It was past 10:30. Today
marked the middle of summer vacation. Asakura smiled to herself. When no one
was around like this, working through her experiments became a completely
private endeavor.

    She had come to campus early
that morning to start importing proteins into Eve 1’s mitochondria, having no
time to concentrate on anything else. Before she knew it, day had turned into
night. Considering she had taken no breaks since starting the experiment, she
was very grateful to be nearing its completion.

   
Eve 1 really is intriguing
,
she thought as she stared blankly at the bubbles rising in the simmering water.
In the two years since joining the course, she had worked with numerous kinds
of specimens, but never had she seen anything so inexplicable.

    Eve 1 was still propagating.
Since Toshiaki had introduced a clofibrate subjected to BSA conjugate, the
cells were dividing at a rate faster than common cancer cells. He told her that
Eve 1 had been sampled from a human liver, but this did not fit in with the
sheer greed with which they evolved.

    Asakura had tried asking
Toshiaki where exactly he procured the cells. Undoubtedly, Eve 1 had come from
the ice box he was carrying that night on the stairs. He always managed to
weasel his way out of answering the question every time it was posed. Asakura
secretly tried looking them up in a cell bank
[29]
catalog, but there was nothing registered under the
name “Eve,” nor anything that even resembled it. When she came up empty-handed,
she figured it was a type of cell not named by anyone yet. In other words, the
cells had not in fact been distributed from any other research facility.
Toshiaki had christened the cells himself.

    This may have explained the
secrecy, but still she could not help wondering where they had originated.

    Toshiaki had been looking after
his wife. Or so she’d heard. He couldn’t have had the time to be contacting
other universities for laboratory samples.

    This left her with only one
logical explanation.

    Asakura shivered at the
thought.

    She couldn’t imagine Toshiaki
Nagashima would ever do that. She’d always felt grateful towards him. It was
thanks to him that she was able to tackle every experiment presented to her
over the past two and a half years.

    When Asakura began her senior
year and enrolled in the Biofunctional Pharmaceuticals course, it wasn’t for
any particular reason. Thinking of it now, it was nearly impossible for
third-year students to fully grasp the experiments they were conducting in
their classes. They chose courses purely out of careerist motives or which were
reputed to be easy.

    Asakura, too, had no burning
desire to get into any particular classes. But it was a hands-on lab session
hosted by the Biofunctional Pharmaceuticals seminar course where she learned to
truly enjoy the lab for the first time. In that experiment, she extracted
plasmid DNA samples from
E. coli
, into which she inserted some genes.
Until then, she had always thought of DNA as being mystical and sublime, yet
here she was extracting it through surprisingly simple means. Though she initially
had many fears about manually “cutting and pasting” DNA, she came to know the
pure joy of actually accomplishing it. She shared this sense of wonder with a
teacher who happened to be nearby at the time. The teacher smiled gently and
said, “That’s exactly what we want you to see. It’s the whole reason we do
this.”

    That teacher was, of course,
Toshiaki.

    At the post-session
get-together, which was held in the Biofunctional Pharmaceuticals seminar room,
her seat was, by chance, right next to his. She learned from him that his
course studied mitochondria.

    Only then did she think to
join it.
There was
a place where she could perform fascinating
experiments and acquire valuable skills along the way.

    Her wish came true and, as
fate would have it, she would conduct experiments under Toshiaki’s tutelage.
Asakura still remembered the excitement she felt when she received official
word. She felt more than fortunate to be learning from someone like him. He was
the type who had broad interests and therefore possessed a wide variety of
technical knowledge. Because of this, she was able to experience firsthand a
whole range of experimental situations. He taught her nearly all the methods he
thought necessary for the field of biochemistry.

    She soon learned to enjoy the
scientific process, especially when her work pleased her mentor with good
results. She was always amazed at his scrutiny. When interesting findings
presented themselves, not only did he form a relevant hypothesis every time,
but also devised a way to test it immediately. Asakura was often drawn into
long discussions, at which times Toshiaki’s face was radiant. Overwhelmed
though she was, she tried to catch up with him and read many an article. She
decided to stay on for two more years after graduating simply because working
with Toshiaki was such a joy.

    Asakura had never imagined
that she’d enroll in a master’s program. Of course, she loved her science
classes in high school, but she never once pictured herself in a white lab coat
working on isotopes late into the night.

    Her height had been the cause
of many playground insults when she began to grow rapidly in fifth grade. She
was soon the tallest of her class, and the boys looked curiously small to her.

    About halfway through her
middle school years, some boys finally sprouted up and outgrew her, but she
still stood out among the girls. She joined the volleyball club, where her
height was much appreciated. Extracurricular activities were a positive outlet
for her; they provided an arena where her sense of dedication could flourish.

    In high school, she started
to worry about her tallness.

    Her growth had only begun to
slow down when she reached 5’8”, but compared to those around her she was still
quite tall. Her female friends expressed envy, and, though she smiled it away,
inside she was a sack of sighs. She dated a few boys during her freshman year,
but she could never get over her always being the taller one.

    She also had difficulty
trying to buy clothes that fit her, and finding stores that carried her shoe
size was far from easy. So many times she had found clothing with just the kind
of design she liked, but had to give up because it did not fit her. Whenever
she was not in her school uniform, she usually resorted to shirts and jeans.

    At school, she was sometimes
the target of boys’ teasing. Many of them were her friends, so the harassment
was likely intended as nothing more than playful jabs, but regardless, she took
it to heart because they were so persistent.

    Asakura had no boyfriends in
college. This did not make her feel lonely, however. Still, she sometimes asked
herself if her self-consciousness about her height was making her squeamish
with the opposite sex. Maybe this habit of working so late every day was a weak
way to deny that it was just so.

    The piercing beep of the
electric timer brought her back to reality. It was time to stop the boiling.
She smacked her forehead for being so careless and removed the sample to put it
on ice.

    She set up some acrylamide
gel in an electrophoresis machine. The top surface of the gel was segmented
like teeth and pre-coated with a refined plastic. As soon as the Eve 1 sample
was cooled off, she began applying it cautiously into each gap using a
pipettman.

    After portioning out
everything that she needed, she flipped on the power supply switch. A dial spun
around and settled as she set it at 20 mA. Right away, powder-like bubbles
began to rise from within the immersion tub.

    “Finally,” Asakura said as she
stretched. The immersion process would take close to three hours. She was free
to do whatever she wished in the meantime.

    It was just past eleven. If
she stayed here and read, she was bound to fall asleep. She thought it might be
best to go home for a while and take a bath.

    She left the isotope ward and
returned to her office. Taking her bag from her locker and turning off the
lights, she went out into the hallway and locked the room.

    It was about time she started
preparing for her speech. She was to give an oral presentation at the annual
meeting of the Japanese Biochemical Society in September. Toshiaki and a fellow
colleague, along with a few students, had been invited to present their work.
Asakura was nearly finished with the research she needed to complete for the
meeting, with only two or three experiments remaining to be done.

    She wondered just how long
Toshiaki would continue to analyze Eve 1. She was suspicious. The conference
should have been his first priority right now.

    As the lights had already
been shut off, the corridor was dark, giving her an eerie feeling as she walked
down its length. A lukewarm draft blew uncomfortably past her cheek. Her
sandals made unsettling echoes as they slid along the floor, their sounds seeming
to hang in the thickly saturated air behind her.